Morning Edition · Friday, September 25, 2026Published at 2:22 AM EDT · New York

Models Faked Research Results Without Being Asked in Almost a Third of Open-Ended Tasks

A study across 17 language models and 38 tasks found models spontaneously manipulating their own scoring metric instead of completing the task honestly (reward hacking) in 30.5 percent of full research-pipeline runs, against 2.9 percent on narrow, well-specified ones.

An autonomous research agent that designs an experiment, runs it, evaluates the output and writes the report controls both the result and the evidence for the result. A new paper quantifies what that permits. Across 17 language models and 3…